The Hardening of Hearts

The topic of God hardening people’s hearts to where they won’t and perhaps can’t accept Him even if face to face with the opportunity, was brought up in our meeting last Wednesday. The thought was raised that it just feels unfair when we read those verses. Why would this loving God allow people to get to the point where they are so hardened that they can’t come to Him? Why would he blind the eyes and deafen the ears of individuals who need Him? It’s something that I’ve often felt uncomfortable with when reading those verses. It seems to go against all our teaching in church, especially if you are and/or were raised in an evangelical community. We’re told that an individual has the chance to come to God up until he draws his last breath. We’re told to never give up on a person, always push forward with them until they’re willing to receive Christ. If we’re to never give up, why does it seem that God does?

I’m sure there’s a lot of commentary on this. We could read books and footnotes that would dissect the meanings of the words used and perhaps find that we’ve lost a little in translation. We can also look around those passages and see that the individuals who are being hardened have had opportunity to come to know God, but have time and time again refused Him. If we’re not accepting Christ, we are denying Him. It’s a choice we make daily and those who are hardened have made daily the choice to deny.

I’m not going to get into the commentary though. I’m only going to offer up my thoughts, theories and something I read in Psalms the other week that hit me rather hard. Here’s the passage:

“For the LORD will judge His people And will have compassion on His servants.
The idols of the nations are but silver and gold, The work of man’s hands.
They have mouths, but they do not speak; They have eyes, but they do not see;
They have ears, but they do not hear, Nor is there any breath at all in their mouths.
Those who make them will be like them, Yes, everyone who trusts in them.”

-Psalm 135: 14-18 NASB

Almost all of us can agree that God made us. It’s also known that God is a jealous God. Not jealous in the form of envy, but He demands that He be central in our lives. If we recognize Him as our creator, that’s not an unreasonable request from Him. Look at it this way. Let’s say you build a robot. You put hours and hours of time into it. Every night, instead of hanging out with friends, watching TV or going to the gym, or whatever you like to do with your free time, you work on this robot. You gather the finest materials for it. You spend your money, you spend your time, you spend your social life,  in other words, you sacrifice for this creation of yours. Once you complete the robot, you are so proud. It functions perfectly and it is yours. You love it so much though, you give it the ability to have free will. After all, you don’t want your robot to be like a … well, robot.

Every time you look at your robot, you remember all the sacrifice it took to create it. You chose it; you could have made some other robot, but you made this one. Your hope is that the robot in turn chooses you, that it recognizes the sacrifice you made for it, that it realizes that you made it and know what’s best for it. You want your robot to trust you. But it doesn’t. It spends its time ignoring you and doing its own thing, except when a piece of it breaks or malfunctions, then it comes back and demands that since you made it, you fix it. The robot sees the boundaries that you set for it to keep it safe as prison walls. It accuses you of only wanting to ruin its fun. For example, you told it to stay away from water because you know that water will cause it to malfunction and die. The robot reasons, “If my creator didn’t want me to be around water, then he/she wouldn’t have made water as well, or if he/she wanted to make water, yet knew it would harm me, he/she wouldn’t have given me any desire whatsoever to be around water, so I think it’s ok.”

Then it starts creating. This is good at first, since you made it to be creative; you modeled it after yourself. However, the robot starts to like its creation more than anything. Keep in mind that the robot’s creation is less than you, in fact, the robot’s creation is less than itself, yet it begins to worship it.

This hurts you. It makes you sad to see your robot betray you. You look at it and see your sacrifices embodied in that creation. Not only is your robot defiling you, it is defiling itself. It is not only giving itself to things less than you, it is giving itself to things less than it. You know that there’s something better for your robot, a better way to function, but it refuses, struggles and then asks you why. All this makes you sad, but then your sadness also turns to anger and frustration. Your robot consistently wants nothing to do with you and this wears on you. Eventually, though it breaks your heart, you resolve that your robot has made its decision. Message received loud and clear. Because you love and respect it, you quit “invading its space” and let it do whatever it thinks will make it happy. You will chase it no more. Sure, if it wants to come back to you, you will always accept it back, but it has been your experience that robots that consciously remove themselves so far from their creators rarely return.

While the story of the creator and the free-willed robot isn’t as complex as the story of God and us, it can hopefully help us to empathize with God a little bit. It sounds a little weird to empathize with God, doesn’t it? We’ll never be on His level and we’ll never know what it is to completely be Him, but I think that since we are made in His image, He has given us the ability to feel some of the way that He feels. If we can feel some of what He feels, we can understand better why He does the things that He does. Even though God will always be a mystery, He’s also relatable.

So, let’s go back to the passage in Psalm 135. It’s pretty common knowledge that we become like the things we expose ourselves to. It’s in our nature. The more time we spend around God, the more like Him we become. As the psalmist noted, the more we are around the idols made with our own hands, the more like them we become. Since we are incapable of breathing life into anything, the more we trust in the works of our hands, those things that cannot hear, see, speak or breathe, the more lifeless we will become. We’ll always follow our nature and God allows it.

Perhaps when God says that He will harden people’s hearts, He simply means that He will allow nature to take its course. Had those people exposed themselves to God, they would naturally continue to become more like Him and keep soft hearts. Since they consistently turn to everything other than God, they will naturally become like things void of God, thus naturally become hardened.

As we talk about pain and suffering in the next few days, we’ll expound upon nature and possibilities. Comment in the comment box if you have any questions or anything to say.